Between OBJ and GEJ and others in-between (II)

Dr Iyabo Obasanjo’s intervention in the rift between her father and President Goodluck Jonathan through her terrible letter to the old man is sadly a testimony to how thoroughly dysfunctional the Obasanjo family is. It also shows how equally guilty – possibly even more so – she is of some of the vices she’s accused her father of; vengeful, hypocritical, opportunistic, ungrateful, and much else besides.

“We, your family,” she wrote in her letter, “have borne the brunt of your direct cruelty and also suffered the consequences of your stupidity BUT GOT NONE OF THE BENEFITS OF YOUR SUCCESSES.” (Emphasis mine). As a vet doctor and a PhD in public health, Iyabo, no doubt, had the credentials to serve as a commissioner of health in her Ogun State and as senator. Surely, however, she should be the first to acknowledge that if she was not an Obasanjo her credentials alone would never have got her those jobs, especially since, as she herself said, she was away from the country from 1989 until the inauguration of her father as president in 1999, except for her brief visit in 1994.

And she was not the only one from her mother, Olurenmi – her portrait of her husband in her 2008 book, Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo, could hardly have been more unflattering – to have greatly benefitted from being an Obasanjo. Her brother, Gbenga, who had accused his father of sleeping with his wife, was also a great beneficiary of their father’s presidency. For example, he reportedly had an interest in an Indian company which snatched a multi-million dollar contract for the rehabilitation and expansion of the power plant of Ajaokuta Steel Company Ltd from Power Works Ltd.

PWL partly belonged to the late Mrs Kathryn Hoomkwap from Plateau State, one of those who worked hard to get Obasanjo elected in 1999 and who helped him draw up a blueprint for the transformation of Nigeria, a blueprint he promptly discarded as soon as he took over power. Kate, a friend and classmate from our university days, worked so hard under then President-Elect Obasanjo’s team headed by late Chief Sunday Awoniyi that Obasanjo reportedly told Chief Awoniyi he may appoint her secretary of his putative government. But not only did he not do so. He was at least complicit in the robbery of PWL’s contract after it has invested heavily in it and giving the job to a company Gbenga had an interest in. Kate died with the burden of the bank loan her company took for the contract.

So for Iyabo to claim that her estranged wing of the Obasanjo family did not benefit one jot from her father’s name was a bit too rich. Her claim may not be the height of ingratitude, but it is close.

Obviously Iyabo’s bitterness with her old man is not because she did not derive any benefit from being an Obasanjo. It seems it is more because she did not get more, given her failed second term senatorial bid and the open secret that she wanted to be a minister. Her father, she must have believed, did not commit himself enough to make those ambitions possible.

Her bitterness is not just with her old man. She seems also bitter with her country. “I tried to contribute my part to the development of my country,” she said in her letter, “but the country decided it didn’t need me.” Part of her bitterness with Nigeria was the scandal that surrounded the retreat in Ghana of the Senate committee on health she headed, a retreat which she herself said was paid for by the Ministry of Health and some international NGOs but which she and her colleagues still went ahead to collect estacodes for, something which was clearly wrong, if only because there is a conflict of interest in ministries paying for the oversight functions of legislators.

Yet like her father who she blames for hypocrisy, she said she saw nothing wrong with what she did. “I did nothing wrong,” she said of the scandal. Instead, she saw everything wrong with a country which could not appreciate her sacrifice as someone who left the comfort of her residency abroad to return and serve her country.

In thinking that the country did not appreciate her sacrifice, Iyabo is clearly one of those Nigerian technocrats in diaspora, genuine and fake alike, who think their expertise entitles them to special treatment in their country when in fact their record of performance has amply demonstrated that they have used their expertise more for self-aggrandisement than for the benefit of their country.

Iyabo resembles her father too much for anyone to accuse her of being a bastard Obasanjo. But what she did to him and to her family is hard, if not impossible, to justify even for a bastard child. If, as she said, her father’s letter to President Jonathan was “vengeful”, hers to her father was worse, especially if, as is being speculated, she was put up to it for pecuniary considerations by the presidency. However, whatever motivated her letter, it is almost impossible to find a word awful enough to describe what she has done to herself, to her father and to her family.

As for President Jonathan’s reply to Obasanjo, his nearly 5,000-word letter has done little, if anything, to belie his estranged benefactor’s charges. As far as compositions go, the president’s reply would probably score much higher than Obasanjo’s 8,000-word or so letter, even though neither of the combatants will win any award for style and grammar.

Beyond its superior style and grammar, however, the president’s letter contains little to belie the substance of Obasanjo’s letter. The summary of the president’s reply was simply to say Obasanjo had done worse during his eight-year presidency than what he has accused the president of.

This thesis is highly debatable. It is debatable, for example, that the country is today more secure, more united and less corrupt than it was during Obasanjo’s time. And certainly the one thing no one can ever accuse Obasanjo of is cluelessness and lack of control over his lieutenants, relations and friends, vices which the president is widely seen to suffer from.

However, even if it is true that Obasanjo was no better than the president in the vices he has accused the president of – and in several ways this is true – this is beside the point, namely the point that leaders should be judged more by the standard they set themselves than by the records of those before.

When President Jonathan took over on his own steam in 2011, he promised to bring in “a breath of fresh air” and transform the country’s political economy. More than half way through his current term the stench oozing out of our country has only got stronger and stronger to the point of almost choking its people.

Take, for example, the country’s state of insecurity. It was not enough for the president to have countered Obasanjo’s charge with the answer that kidnapping for ransom, oil theft and the Boko Haram insurgency predated his presidency. The question, which he did not answer satisfactorily, was what has he done since then to stem these and other forms of insecurities in the land?

One of his answers is that the presidency has poured in billions into building schools for almajirai (so-called child destitutes) to address ignorance and poor education as two of the factors he said are responsible for Boko Haram insurgency. He also said his government has established 12 more universities in the country, nine in the North and three in the South, as if the problems of our universities are their numbers rather than their quality.

What this answer clearly betrays is a frame of mind which lacks a proper grasp of the complexity of almajirai and which thinks the solution to virtually every problem is simply to throw money at it when all that this has done in the past is to breed even more corruption.

On corruption itself, to take another example, the president said he “will not shield any government official or private individual involved in corruption” but added the convenient caveat that he “must follow due process in all that I do.”

Right now, the most glaring opportunity for the president to prove he will not shield any of his officials implicated in any corruption is the well publicised case of his Minister of Aviation, Ms Stella Oduah, whose sack has been widely demanded for, for importing armoured cars, presumably for personal use, that were never budgeted for at highly inflated prices.

The president is right to insist he would not sack any of his officials without due process. But when a president sets up a panel to investigate an official and then refuses to disclose the outcome of the investigation – never mind acting on it – weeks after he publicly announces to the world that the report is on his table, as is the case with his minister of aviation, he can only blame himself if his vows of zero tolerance of corruption rings hollow in the public ear.

Still on corruption, the president says he is “amazed” that with all of Obasanjo’s knowledge, he still believed the “spurious allegation” made by the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that $49.8 billion of recent oil receipts had been unaccounted for by the NNPC, presumably stolen. Now that Sanusi has recanted, the president said, Obasanjo should find it in his “heart to apologise for misleading unwary Nigerians and impugning the integrity of my administration on that score.”

With due respect to the president, he is merely being clever by half. True, Sanusi clearly got his arithmetic grossly wrong. However, his point that NNPC had not accounted for all oil proceeds remains valid; the Minister of Finance, Dr Okonjo-Iweala, has admitted that over $10 billion remains unaccounted for. This is only a fifth of Sanusi’s figure, but $10 billion is by no means peanuts by anyone’s standard.

One can go on to show how the president did not satisfactorily debunk Obasanjo’s other charges – his handling of the economy, his anti-party activities and his use of ethnicity and religion to divide and rule this country, etc – but what is more important is that the president is seen to live by the standard he had set for himself.

He has little time to make amends before the next presidential election which he is clearly determined to contest. He will spend this time more usefully trying to make these amends than in trying to divert the public’s attention to his erstwhile benefactor’s motives, whatever they are.